1. Field of the Invention
This invention pertains generally to securities investing and more specifically to construction and use of passive portfolios and indexes.
2. Related Art
Conventionally, there are various broad categories of securities portfolio management. One conventional securities portfolio management category is active management wherein the securities are selected for a portfolio individually based on economic, financial, credit, and/or business analysis; on technical trends; on cyclical patterns; etc. Another conventional category is passive management, also called indexing, wherein the securities in a portfolio duplicate those that make up an index. The securities in a passively managed portfolio are conventionally weighted by relative market capitalization weighting or equal weighting. Another middle ground conventional category of securities portfolio management is called enhanced indexing, in which a portfolio's characteristics, performance and holdings are substantially dominated by the characteristics, performance and holdings of the index, albeit with modest active management departures from the index.
The present invention relates generally to the passive and enhanced indexing categories of portfolio management. A securities market index, by intent, reflects an entire market or a segment of a market. A passive portfolio based on an index may also reflect the entire market or segment. Often every security in an index is held in the passive portfolio. Sometimes statistical modeling is used to create a portfolio that duplicates the profile, risk characteristics, performance characteristics, and securities weightings of an index, without actually owning every security included in the index. (Examples could be portfolios based on the Wilshire 5000 Equity Index or on the Lehman Aggregate Bond Index.) Sometimes statistical modeling is used to create the index itself such that it duplicates the profile, risk characteristics, performance characteristics, and securities weightings of an entire class of securities. (The Lehman Aggregate Bond Index is an example of this practice.)
Indexes are generally all-inclusive of the securities within their defined markets or market segments. In most cases indexes may include each security in the proportion that its market capitalization bears to the total market capitalization of all of the included securities. The only common exceptions to market capitalization weighting are equal weighting of the included securities (for example the Value Line index or the Standard & Poors 500 Equal Weighted Stock Index, which includes all of the stocks in the S&P 500 on a list basis; each stock given equal weighting as of a designated day each year) and share price weighting, in which share prices are simply added together and divided by some simple divisor (for example, the Dow Jones Industrial Average). Conventionally, passive portfolios are built based on an index weighted using one of market capitalization weighting, equal weighting, and share price weighting.
Advantages of passive investing include: a low trading cost of maintaining a portfolio that has turnover only when an index is reconstituted, typically once a year; a low management cost of a portfolio that requires no analysis of individual securities; and no chance of the portfolio suffering a loss—relative to the market or market segment the index reflects—because of misjudgments in individual securities selection.
Advantages of using market capitalization weighting as the basis for a passive portfolio include that the index (and therefore a portfolio built on it) remains continually ‘in balance’ as market prices for the included securities change, and that the portfolio performance participates in (i.e., reflects) that of the securities market or market segment included in the index.
The disadvantages of market capitalization weighting passive indexes, which can be substantial, center on the fact that any under-valued securities are underweighted in the index and related portfolios, while any over-valued securities are over weighted. Also, the portfolio based on market capitalization weighting follows every market (or segment) bubble up and every market crash down. Finally, in general, portfolio securities selection is not based on a criteria that reflects a better opportunity for appreciation than that of the market or market segment overall.